


Dinobite

by audreycritter



Series: Cor Et Cerebrum [25]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, aftermath of attack, alien beasts, bad jokes at superman as a coping mechanism, does it sound like science because i made it up, ill-advised hyperspace travel with only a helmet, space, trauma bonding with jurassic park
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-13 21:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19259314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: The problem with Dev going on a hike these days is that there is an 80% chance it will end in disaster, probably very far away, probably involving Bruce bleeding on something.At least this time it was for science?





	Dinobite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starknjarvis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starknjarvis/gifts).



> this story was posted to tumblr MONTHS ago and somehow got overlooked in the uploading process to be cross-posted here.

The towering pines groaned in the mountain breeze. The branches, thick with needles, caught the wind and kept it from sweeping across the rubberized picnic table nestled in a tiny clearing off the main path. Kiran Devabhaktuni finished off the homemade protein bar he’d pried out of a wax paper wrapper and unscrewed the cap from his steel water bottle.

“Still think we’ll make it back to the lake house before dark?” Timothy Drake-Wayne asked, looking up from the zipper he was wrestling with on his backpack. The pack was next to Dev’s own on the table, where they’d lined them up when they sat to take a break after the steepest part of the climb.

“Bloody hell, Timothy, it’s not like you’re afraid of the—”

Dark.

Everything was dark.

Dev’s entire body rebelled against the paradoxical sensation of moving faster than he’d ever moved before, and absolute stillness. It went on for long seconds, enough for his shrieking mind to be convinced he was dropping dead of a stroke right in front of poor Timothy. Flashes of light went in and out and something was clamped uncomfortably around his head, and he was bone-deep freezing while his blood boiled in his veins.

This was hell, this was the hell his British grandmum had terrorized his child-self with when she found him drawing pictures of Kali at the kitchen table.

 _Lakes of fire,_  she’d whispered, sliding him a biscuit.  _Weeping and gnashing of teeth without end._

Then, it stopped.

Dev was on his hands and knees, trying to gasp and puking into the helmet that covered his face. He ripped it off with trembling fingers, his muscles too limp to fling it away. He let it drop, splattered visor and all, to the bronzed grass. With a gasp, he sat back on his folded legs and tipped his head back at a pale gray sky.

“Bloody…fucking…”

“…without warning. He…help right…”

Words went in his ears and prodded his brain in fragments.

“What,” he finally managed, twisting.

Then, he was scrambling to his feet and patting his side where his emergency kit should have been hanging, and ripping his jacket and shirt off because the kit wasn’t there.

Batman was on his back, the ground beneath him stained with blood. His chest armor was torn in half, and part of the upper pants were shredded. Blood pulsed up from jagged wounds in his side, his chest, his thigh with every irregular beat of his heart.

The thigh needed attention first. The blood there was a shade of red that made Dev certain an artery had been nicked if not torn, and the sluggish rate now meant it had been long enough to reach dangerous levels of blood loss.

“I need my kit,” he snapped, leaning his weight into the folded over shirt pressed against the leg wound. In his peripheral there was a swoop of red cape and then an ear-cracking pop.

The black kit was dropped at his side.

“Open it,” he said, numb to who he was barking orders at. “Antiseptic, nylon 8-0, 75 needle, approximator clamps, saline, irrigation syringe. You’ll need to manage the syringe.”

Superman had the items out faster than any explanation of location Dev could have given would have been, even if half the contents of the kit were now scattered across the golden bladed grass in his high-speed search.

The tear in the artery wasn’t complete but it took ten sutures to close. His hands felt heavy while he worked— they were responsive and accurate, just weighed down. The blood irrigated from the artery with swishes of saline seeped away with a weirdly sluggish pace that Dev couldn’t risk being distracted by at the moment, but seemed off in a way he couldn’t immediately determine.

When the artery was closed, he moved on, methodically working through the visible problems in order of most dangerous to least. A lot of it would need further treatment later, but couldn’t be handled in the field beyond just patchwork care.

It felt like mere minutes swollen to fill long hours later that he sat back to survey the various sutures and dressings, his gloved hands dripping with beading blood.

“Now we sodding wait,” Dev said, peeling off the gloves. “Until I’m sure he’s stable.”

“I said, earlier, that I’m sorry,” Superman said. Dev’s medkit was repacked already. “I didn’t have time to warn you. I didn’t think he’d survive being moved. I left Tim a note. And I broke your car window getting the kit but the League will replace it.”

“Eh,” Dev said, waving his hand. The travel wasn’t exactly pleasant but he thought the effects had worn off. The car window was bound to get broken sooner or later, in Gotham.

He studied the broken edge of Batman’s armor while also double checking the dressing on a rough gash across the man’s scarred abdomen. “What happened, anyway? This doesn’t look like the usual gun, fire, or brick.”

It looked an awful lot like some damage Killer Croc had done once, actually.

An awful lot.

He squinted and then whipped his head around to look, just as Superman was replying.

“I think it’s some kind of panther and bird hybrid.”

The corpse of a long animal, with matted tuffs of blue fur, lay belly-up on a dozen feet away. Dev had been too focused to notice it before. A black tongue lolled out of its mouth, its rows of long teeth dark with blood. It had crumpled brown wings splayed beneath it.

“That,” Dev said, swallowing, “is a dragon.”

“We don’t know what the local literature calls it because, well, there isn’t one.” Superman frowned. “I killed it after it attacked him. He’s going to be pissed.”

“Is it from…space?” Dev asked, glancing at the gray sky. The cloud cover was so thick he couldn’t see the sun, but the light was diffused somehow and it didn’t seem particularly overcast on the ground.

“I mean, yeah,” Superman said, as if surprised. “Technically.”

Dev couldn’t have felt more upside down if Superman had grabbed his ankle and hauled him a hundred feet into the sky. His hands were buried in the bronze grass and he was firmly on the packed earth except he had a sneaking and sickening and thrilling suspicion it wasn’t…

 _Earth_.

The distant trees, now that he actually looked at them, had strange shapes and colors. Some of them curved in unnatural ways.

“This isn’t South America,” he said faintly.

“No,” Superman said. “It’s a small planet named J983-7 in the databases and as far as we can tell, it doesn’t have any native species that have developed language yet— it’s an early evolutionary phase, relatively speaking.”

Because he was sitting on the ground and not in a chair, putting his head between his crooked knees did very little, but Dev put his head between his knees anyway. He breathed, in and out.

“The helmet,” he choked. “That’s why the…”

He’d been in space. Superman had flown him through vast and endless, sodding, bloody, fucking space.

To another planet.

“Shite,” he exhaled.

“Are you okay?” Superman was crouched beside him.

“The blood…” Dev said, forcing himself to lift his head. “The blood was weird. My body is too heavy.”

“The planet has a magnetic field of 0.80 gauss offset by the one-third rotation speed, because of a dense lodestone core. We were here taking some readings—”

“Brain surgeon not rocket scientist,” Dev joked weakly.

“Liquid has a reduced flow rate here,” Superman said.

“That explains the slowed blood loss,” Dev said, studying Batman again. Batman’s breathing had evened out from the concerning stutter it had been while Dev had sutured a deep laceration above his hip.

Focusing on the injured hero was easier than looking across the foreign landscape. He liked space, and in theory liked the idea of traveling around space— but this was too sudden. What if something attacked Superman? What was he vulnerable to in this system? How long would they be stranded trillions of kilometers from home?

His head was between his knees again before his breathing turned into harsh gasps. He forced himself to count each inhale.

“Are you alright?” Superman asked, from nearby.

“Fine,” Dev ground out between his clenched teeth. “Bloody brilliant.”

“I’m sorry for the shock. I know it’s a lot to take in,” Superman said, sounding like someone who had maybe possibly forgotten just how much it actually was to absorb.

“Eh,” Dev said.

When it was easier to breathe normally again, he lifted his head and looked around— the dragon-creature’s corpse, the bronze grass, the corkscrewed trees. He held a hand up experimentally and felt more acutely the increase in weight, like a thick blanket had been thrown over him.

“Reduced oxygen levels via blood flow don’t appear to be causing any immediate problems,” he said, his brow creased while he was thinking.

“The atmosphere has increased air pressure,” Superman said.

Dev shifted to check on Batman and noticed that Superman was holding Wayne’s hand. He staggered up and moved close enough to check pulse.

“Like a hyperbaric chamber,” Dev said, more as a question.

“Something like that,” Superman said. “We were here doing preliminary testing to see if the planet is viable as an incubator location for some struggling species. Contained, of course. He’s opposed to the idea but came along to humor me. I think he’s going to be even more opposed now.”

“What?” Dev was content with the pulse rate and he sat back. “You don’t think he’ll bloody go all-in now? A sodding  _fuck you_  to the entire planet?”

Superman laughed, a startled bark that grew into something relieved. He tipped his head back toward the sky, eyes closed, and sighed.

“No,” Batman mumbled, making Dev jump. “Risk…invasive…too high…territorial…predators. Life finds…way.”

Superman sighed a second time. “I know. Don’t quote Jurassic Park at me. But I needed to try. The uh, thing that attacked you…I may have accidentally snapped its neck.”

“Dammit,” Batman said hollowly.

“Like a chicken,” Dev said. “You know how I feel about dinosaurs, mate. I couldn’t have worked if that thing was still breathing nearby.”

“Oh,” Batman said, his mouth beneath the cowl curving into a pronounced frown. “You’re…space.”

“I wouldn’t bloody go that far, but I am something of a masterpiece, I agree.” Dev nodded, hoping his calm humor kept Batman from rousing too much. He was also hoping that it hid the screaming spike of fear prodding every cell of him after realizing that a dinosaur-like dragon-adjacent creature meant others like it might be nearby.

Batman groaned, but he was seeming more lucid, despite injuries.

“Let’s leave before you kill something else, Kal.”

Dev nodded to Superman’s questioning look and he climbed to his feet and scooted back while Superman talked quietly, and apologetically, to Batman before picking him up.

“Hop on,” he said to Dev, when he had Batman in a bridal carry.

“What? Your back? Now?” Dev asked, startled. He knew, cognitively, that Superman wasn’t human— he’d even seen him do incredible things in person. But it didn’t absolve the dissonance of being asked to climb on another man’s back while he held hundreds of kilos of friend and armor and gear.

“Unless you’d rather wait here alone until I come back,” Superman said. “Get your helmet.”

Dev grabbed the helmet and his medical kit, spared the two seconds to swipe an alcohol wipe along the visor. It wasn’t clean exactly but it was better than nothing.

He was prepared to look at Batman and make some awkward joke, directed at the cowl and face mask Superman had attached to it, but the second his arms went around Superman’s neck, the entire universe blurred.

Then he was in the Watchtower medical unit, leaning over a sink and willing himself not to puke again. The bag was at his feet.

“The straps,” he choked, “should not survive G-forces like that.”

Superman, near Batman on a gurney, shrugged. “I don’t know how it works. It’s not for lack of trying, either.”

Washing his hands with warm water from the faucet was a normal, grounding activity that had the right weight and tension to it. Dev hooked up antibiotics and a unit of blood, got an IV into Batman and checked dressed wounds again.

That turned into sedation and tugging off the cowl and strapping on an oxygen mask. Abdominal surgery couldn’t wait, after all, and it was hours later that he sat down on the other side of the medical unit, content Wayne was in the clear.

Superman, looking an awful lot more like Clark Kent now, disappeared with a muttered apology and excuse. He came back ten minutes later with a steaming mug.

“It’s not as good as A’s, but I’ve heard you like tea,” he said, handing the cup into Dev’s eager hands.

“Bloody hell,” Dev exhaled, closing his eyes when he took a sip. “You’re my hero.”

“I hear that a lot, but normally, I do a little more than making tea before people say it,” Superman said, with a tired smile.

“He’s going to be sodding fine,” Dev said, fingers wrapped around the mug. He nodded toward Wayne. “He’s a stubborn bastard, and he’s had worse— this year, even.”

“I know,” Superman said quietly, but Dev didn’t miss the way Superman’s shoulders relaxed.

“I don’t want to move him again for at least a day,” Dev said. “But you don’t have to stay, if there are things you’ve to do. I swear on my naanii’s grave I’ll stay where I have clearance.”

“I’m busy but not too busy for this,” Superman said. “Do you need anything? Food? I could get a pack of cards.”

“Thanks, mate, but I don’t eat paper.”

Superman gave him a sharp look. Dev fought the impulse to wither under that alien, superpowered disappointment even in jest or exasperation.

“This is why Tim gets along with you,” Superman said evenly.

“Food,” Dev said, with a grin. “Anything’s fine. And I’d love to play a hand of rummy, even if I know I’ll lose.”

“You shouldn’t think so little of yourself,” Superman said, in a gentle reprimand. “Even if you will lose.”

Dev laughed and shrugged. “I know my limits as a mere mortal when against Superman. I can’t compete against x-ray vision.”

“I don’t cheat!” Superman exclaimed, sounding more like just Clark Kent than he had in hours. “Dev, I don’t cheat.”

“I guess you’ll have to let me win a hand to prove it,” Dev said sweetly.

Superman narrowed his eyes. “I think that’s emotional coercion.”

“Is it bloody working?” Dev asked. “I’ve been taking lessons from Wayne’s kids.”

The laughter carried back into the room from the hall and a few minutes later, Dev was eating a sandwich while Superman shuffled cards.

“So,” Superman said slowly. “How did you like visiting your second planet?”

“Bloody brilliant,” Dev said. “I rather enjoyed that the dinosaur was already dead.”

“I thought you said it was a dragon.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Dev said. “The moment you mentioned Jurassic Park.”

“Would you like to see a planet with real dinosaurs?” Superman offered kindly, dealing out cards.

“That sounds an awful bloody lot like a threat,” Dev said, frowning. “I take it back. You don’t have to let me win a round.”

Superman’s smile was bright and reassuring and without guile. “Wasn’t planning on it,” he said.

In silence for a moment, they studied their cards; Dev checked on monitor readouts for Wayne and satisfied everything was normal, went back to his hand.

“Thank you,” Superman said. “For, well…you know. Keeping him alive.”

“Anytime,” Dev said casually. “It’s my sodding job.”

“I think it’s been more than just that for a while,” Superman said.

Dev thought of the things he’d seen and done the past few years and considered arguing with that assessment, but he moved his cards around into an approximation of order.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It bloody is, at that.”


End file.
